"We may terminate the Agreement or restrict, suspend or terminate your use of the Service at our discretion without notice at any time, including if we determine that your use violates the Agreement, is improper, substantially exceeds or differs from normal use by other users, or otherwise involves fraud or misuse of the Service or harms our interests or those of another user of the Service."
> We are constantly changing and improving our Services. We may add or remove functionalities or features, and we may suspend or stop a Service altogether... Google may also stop providing Services to you, or add or create new limits to our Services at any time.
Of course. Because what is the alternative? "We guarantee that we will operate this service for the next 1000 years, regardless of global warming, pestilence, famine and war?"
Nothing lives forever. No company lives forever. Amazon, Microsoft, Google...may all go away some day.
And, of course, they may change their business focus and decide to go a different way. I would expect any of them to provide notice and let people get their data out...but one should always assume that a service will go away at some point.
Yeah, there's really two things here. 1) Shutting down the service entirely; 2) shutting off _your_ account in particular. Or really, also 3) Changing the terms (for instance deciding it's not really 'unlimited' after all).
You're talking about 1, and sure, there's not a lot you can do.
As far as 2 and 3, back in the day, when you paid for a service you might sign a contract, and they could not simply decide to cancel your service in the middle of the contract because they didn't like you, for reasons not covered by the contract.
Of course, that also assumes that they wouldn't just put "and by the way we can cancel your service at any time for any reason including just because we don't like you" in the contract, or that you would have some kind of negotiating power to demand different terms or go with a competitor with better terms. But obviously they _would_ just put that in the contract too, as they did in the ToS which is theoretically a contract too.
And there's really another thing too specific to the Amazon terms posted above. They are advertising the service as 'unlimited', but then the terms say they can shut you off if your use "substantially exceeds or differs from normal use by other users." That doesn't really sound "unlimited" exactly, does it? I don't know if putting "Ha ha not really unlimited" in the ToS would protect them from such things as this: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/10/ftc-s...
I always thought Tor hidden services make a great way to host your own cloud. Not only can you host on your own hardware without messing with dns, isp reps, and router settings, but you get privacy features for free.
IMO, I think local hosting is the primary usecase the Tor project should be advertizing.
Hidden services are not a primary concern of the Tor Project, or a primary use of the Tor network. They are a novel way of using a system designed for anonymous and censorship-resistant communications.
Doesn't solve the problem. The essential nature of the problem is that your data can disappear under circumstances that you can't control, be it because the server died, problems with the host, they're going away entirely, they decide they don't like you anymore. To fix all permutations of this problem, you have to replicate, host the data in multiple physical places.
It introduces another problem, managing the replication and testing to make sure it's working, but if the data you're trying to protect is important enough, you devote the resources.
Looked at in this light, hosting your own physical box is less useful than using two separate online services. You still have the management and testing overhead either way, but with your own physical box you also have to maintain and manage that resource too. That only makes sense if you have existing infrastructure you can plug into, and sometimes it doesn't even make sense then.
Or vice versa... all the solutions you mentioned are liabilities if given enough thought. The cost of hosting in multiple places coupled with the very real possibility of other circumstances not in your control are enough to make the argument to host your own stuff a viable solution. The cognitive overhead of learning the api, writing tools to automate processes, testing and so on are not free in either time or money.
I don't think a clear cut winner emerges in all cases. Cloud vs. DIY is situationally dependent and requires a great deal of deliberation. I think the pendulum will swing between cloud and DIY for a long time... With proponents of each making awesome cases to use either one.
When it comes to risk, honestly, most people and companies are their own worst enemies, much much more inclined to hose themselves than, say, Linode or Amazon would.
The cost of using multiple solutions should be negligible compared to the cost of losing the information. If it isn't, then store it wherever, and if you lose it, so what.
A competent developer should not have to spend a lot of time learning an api, automating the process or testing the automation. If you don't have a competent developer, you should just use COTS. If you have a developer that complains about the time these tasks take, you don't have a developer, you have a technical handyman. In which case you can't engineer anything and should just use COTS, because that's all he'll realistically be able to handle anyway. If the developer is you and you can't afford to waste your time engineering your infrastructure, then yours is not a technology company and again should just use COTS.
Your operating profits should support the cost of your engineering, including the salary of a competent developer, this will typically dwarf your hosting costs. If they don't then you don't have a real business and need to spend more time figuring out how you're going to make money and less time on the technology.
If you're storing and using big data, and currently using a cloud provider, then your roadmap should include a plan for eventual self-hosting, as that's one of the few areas where self-hosting still makes sense, as costs can diverge very quickly. It's not big data unless building your own Backblaze storage pod is a viable option.
For all other applications, self-hosting can quickly become a boondoggle, unless you have competent systems administration, the cost of which will again dwarf your hosting costs. If you do not have competent systems administration, and you are owning and managing systems, then your business is a disaster waiting to happen. If the hard drives fill up on your home-built server, you will have downtime until you can figure it out and fix it. You will not have your hosting company's skilled customer support team, which handles the common cases that trip people up all the time, at your disposal.
Any time you touch the machine do do anything other than deployments, you run the risk of breaking something important. If your development is not competent either, then you run the risk of having your hygienic development process dirtied by, say, someone working directly on the production server. The problems caused by this are insidious and can take up time and attention that is better used pushing your business forward.
I worked for a company that had hundreds of boxes held hostage after a colo attempted to dramatically raise prices mid contract. The company eventually sent a bunch of employees with vans over a weekend to the city the colo was in to physically move the machines and reconstitute ~20 racks in a different colo.
Getting serious power / ac / battery switch-over / TB/s internet is a lot of work, hence datacenters. If you're under thousands of boxes, it's not cost effective.
Unless you also have your own physical network infrastructure connecting all the things it needs to connect to, and also control all those endpoints, having your own physical server doesn't solve the problem, it just pushes it around a bit.
This is not about a company closing down. Its about a company deciding to close their services for a user, arbitrarily, at their own discretion. Files you upload can be permanent deleted, at any time, at the whim of the service provider or any of their employees. You have no rights and no appeals.
The difference is that a user doesn't feel like just using his computer normally gives him any backup. But if his folder is inside Dropbox, he might be lulled into a sense of comfort since he thinks of Dropbox as a kind of backup[1]. So if he uses Dropbox instead of just using his plain old computer (hard drive), then he might start to get more careless than when he didn't feel that he had a safety net.
Amazon may actually be fair and enforce this legitimately, but I was once burned badly by the promise of "Unlimited Storage." Bluehost offered this, always with an asterisk*, and I assumed it was legitimate. So I tried to upload 20 gigs of home videos and family photos to share with my relatives.
Next thing I know, all of my sites are 404ing, and when I call Bluehost, the tech tells me they shut down my hosting service because I was "abusing their unlimited storage." Then they pointed me to the asterisk that says unlimited storage isn't really unlimited and is whatever they feel like it should be on a case-by-case basis. Then I had to sit there on the phone with them and delete all my recently uploaded files before they would put my websites back online.
Had this happen to me in the 90's with a dial up internet provider. The ISP said it was unlimited usage. So we had a second phone line in our house online a big chunk of the day. Eventually we got a bill with a very large "dedicated line fee" because we were dialed in too much. After enough complaining they removed the charge, but it was a good lesson that "unlimited" services backed by a finite resource are never truly unlimited.
It just allows them the ability to kick off abusers. Someone is going to write a script to endlessly upload nonsense data to Amazon just because they can.
By that logic, nothing can be unlimited. There are a finite number of computers, hard drives, heck even atoms in the world and therefore no company could offer an unlimited amount of storage.
That logic is not what we're measuring against. The logic we're measuring against is the existence of a number, which represents some amount of data stored which, when reached, will result in the termination of your account.
"Unlimited" service if honestly sold and serviced, would mean that this number does not exist. You could keep throwing data at them and they could keep storing it.
What is that number? Is it low? Is it high? Only Amazon knows, but in the meantime, they're pretending that this number does not exist.
What makes you think the number exists and this isn't just a standard "don't be an asshole" clause to protect Amazon from someone who abuses the system?
Here's the thing - when you throw around words like "unlimited", "abuse" gets really hard to define. Some guy hosting his warez collection for all his scene friends? Obviously abuse.
Me uploading my >1TB music/video collection for backup purposes that will only ever be touched by me? I honestly don't know, and knowing the way accounts are integrated, I'd rather not find out the hard way.
Logically, the acceptable amount they "want" you to store is obviously north of 5GB, since you get that for free by being a Prime member and you're paying for an upgrade, but I want to know where the line is, instead of playing this "it doesn't exist (but actually does and you're dead if you cross it)" charade.
It's much like companies having "unlimited vacation", where the net effect is that nobody takes any due to uncertainty.
How does my taking a company's advertising at its word and treating the unlimited service they provide as unlimited make me an asshole?
The real problem is these companies want to eat their cake and have it too. They want to be able to advertise as unlimited, but not actually provide unlimited.
Before, it was "unlimited photos." That makes sense: they'd remove anything that's not a photo. It's limited by kind, not by size.
Now it's "your files, documents, etc." That's still a limitation by kind—the emphasis is on the "your." You can store as much data that you honestly, personally created for your own personal use, as you like.
Random terabyte-sized binaries? Not your personal data. Someone else's files? Not your personal data. Automated logs? Not your personal data.
But if you manage to create a few petabytes of vacation images? Sure, go right ahead.
My fully legal music collection curated over the past decade or so? Absolutely my personal data. Backups of my home server that run, among other things, personal websites, source code repos, and a home automation system? Absolutely my personal data. How about paperwork from the doctor's office? I'd like to see you argue that isn't "my personal data" despite not being created by me.
What if it's all encrypted? Actually, scratch that, if I'm putting any substantial data in a random cloud service, it's going to be encrypted, period. Amazon gets incompressible, non-dedupable random bytes and nothing else.
What this all boils down to is that your definition is arbitrary and illogical, and has no support from the documentation, either friendly or legal, which leaves us right where we started:
Nobody knows how much they can put on this service, and the word "unlimited" is still false advertising.
You're imagining that there is a limit imposed by a technical measure that can detect accounts that are, by strict definition, breaking the terms of the agreement. And since they are not telling you the limit encoded by this technical measure, the service is not unlimited.
There is no technical measure.
Instead, there is a heuristic that makes them curious about the purpose to which you are putting all your data usage. They then have the right to ask you to show them what kind of stuff you're putting in the cloud drive, at which point they can apply the actual measure—a human, ontological, qualitative measure of the "color" of your bits.
This is how the legal system works; this is how contracts work. Their provisions don't have to be interpretable by a dumb algorithm; they can be AGI-complete to solve for. This is why the court system has both police (instructed in an simple-but-false-positive-generating heuristic), and judges and/or juries (who are expected to then apply the human-deliberation-requiring "true algorithm" to screen out the false positives.)
Picture a savings account that holds "unlimited money." Does this mean that it holds money derived from tax fraud? No. Does this mean that it holds money used to create a correspondent deposit account for a wire-transfer service? No. These facts are intuitively obvious. Why doesn't it do these things? Because an account that does these things ceases to be a savings account per se. In the former case, it becomes an illegal conspiracy if they knowingly continue to serve you. In the latter case, it becomes a business account requiring strict money-service auditing. In both cases, if the bank detects suspicious activity (i.e. pushing millions of dollars around every day in said account), they have every right to ask you to what purpose you're putting their service—and to take the service away if you refuse to answer.
They then have the right to ask you to show them what kind of stuff you're putting in the cloud drive
"Show" them? As previously mentioned, I'm encrypting my content. The nature of the data I'm story is both none of their business (I'm paying for unlimited data storage, not unlimited data storage of certain file types after all, per their advertising) and anyways it exposes them to further legal liability by way of asking that question.
If you're saying that the word can be used, but you know in Amazon's case that there is a secret number, then they shouldn't use it.. that seems unfair. There will always be a number to unlimited, hopefully published. It's technically impossible for it to be unlimited.
I mean, let me reverse the situation, and ask what amount of data/m or data/lifetime (data == tb, pb, whatever) would fit the word - for you?
When I hear "unlimited", I think of "enough data that you will never have to worry about hitting a hard cap".
The definition of "enough data" is going to vary person to person. I saw this and my mind went immediately to backups, but that is not a trivial amount of data (terabytes+), and I am not prepared to risk my Amazon account over it.
That's the problem, here. By not knowing what the number is, you are unable to make correct decisions, and with the alternative being account termination, that is unacceptable. Amazon has constructed a situation in which it's unclear what exactly they're selling, but since we know in advance that there must be a limit, they are advertising falsely.
The moment they kick someone out for this, ToS or not, they will have a legitimate claim of action. And I will guarantee you the actual number is going to be smaller than you think.
> That's the problem, here. By not knowing what the number is, you are unable to make correct decisions, and with the alternative being account termination, that is unacceptable. Amazon has constructed a situation in which it's unclear what exactly they're selling, but since we know in advance that there must be a limit, they are advertising falsely.
I definitely agree there. Though, i think their ToS could solve this by stating it in the fine print - assuming of course they really wanted to market the "Unlimited" word.
I did have a thought though, it was be interesting if a service like this offered "true" unlimited storage. How? Well, you could limit the upload/download rate, and ensure that you are always willing to expand faster than each user can upload.
Would make for an interesting PR spin for Unlimited.. but with so many companies touting Unlimited, it clearly wouldn't be worth it. Just an interesting thought.
I worked for a company that offered an unlimited X. A startup used us to host some of their X, and literally uploaded a thousand times more data than any other user.
That is why those things end up in contracts.
Someone is going to attempt to upload a pb of photos to amazon, and amazon is saying unlimited, but for personal usage (threshold quite possibly judged on a case-by-case basis), but doesn't include free storage of pbs of pictures.
At the end of the day, users need to be somewhat reasonable about what they expect from a $60/year service.
The main reason they don't want to do that is because their target market won't have any idea what X GB or Y TB means. Unlimited is their whole draw. I agree with the various sibling replies saying that it's not reasonable to expect them to allow truly unlimited storage. If you're storing petabytes, it's too much. But what they could easily do is simply include a clause in their TOS saying, "'Unlimited' in this context means up to 10TB" or whatever. Large enough that it would be effectively unlimited for any reasonable personal use, but still there's a cap to prevent true abuse. Much better than this, "There's actually a limit, but we won't tell you what it is," nonsense.
If we really want to be so pedantic then the term unlimited can never be used in this context due to the Bekenstein bound.
IMO the term is still a useful marketing short-hand that has come to mean "more than can reasonably expected unless you are purposefully trying to break the system", though cellular data providers in particular have done their part to cloud the issue by having "unlimited" terms that are really ridiculously limited.
Based on my dealings with Amazon so far I have every reason to believe their "unlimited" will be, if anything, overly generous.
That should not be our problem. If they find that difficult to communicate without lying (by calling it "unlimited"), perhaps they should set a non-variable cap.
In which case it's not unlimited, in which case they're lying.
The first person who gets kicked off for this should file a false advertising suit. The marketing doesn't get to give you something which the ToS immediately takes away.
Maybe then these idiots (yes, idiots, because it takes an astounding lack of either morals or intelligence) will learn that lying to your customers is not okay.
If they boot someone off for that particular reason, then yes, they absolutely should.
Again - explain to me how Verizon can be successfully sued for "unlimited" data (with throttling) and how these companies cannot with "unlimited" data (with undisclosed caps).
Explain how the two cases are substantially different, please. Just because Verizon are generally bastards and the companies above are generally not does not make false advertising okay or legal.
> explain to me how Verizon can be successfully sued for "unlimited" data
Just curious, but you say "successfully sued." I assume you mean they were sued, went to trial, and lost. I've actually tried looking this up, but I can't find this case. I've never really paid much attention to that, so forgive me.
It was a settlement, rather than an outright adverse ruling, but the net effect was the same - someone had to tap them on the shoulder and tell them to cut it out, they did, and had to pay out for their trouble.
It's not lying, come on. 99.9% of people will see it as being unlimited. The person who decides to create a megaupload clone and use it to store petabytes worth of stuff that is constantly reading and writing is not what personal unlimited storage is meant for.
That's still contradictory. Unlimited means "without limits", not "without limits except for these".
Verizon got smacked around for exactly this behavior a while ago (selling "unlimited" data, with throttling after some arbitrary cap). This is not substantially different.
Gmail used to show an ever-incrementing storage limit that was huge at the time, coupled with a message (when you were logged in) saying something like "you're using 5% of your limit".
If Amazon did something like that, they could call it "Practically Unlimited", go on about "you could store 10 thousand hours of high def video" or whatever so that normal users get the idea that it's plenty, and still give the actual limits to those who care.
Maybe the catch is that they want a limit that's high enough that practically nobody will hit it, but low enough that it isn't a net loss if someone does fill it up, otherwise their enemies could get a bunch of dummy accounts and fill them up. So they'd rather just maintain the right to preferential treatment.
...because "all you can eat" is not the same as "all you want to eat"
A buffet doesn't have to limit anyone's consumption to keep them at reasonable levels. Just like you can have broadband service with unlimited traffic. But storage is relatively expensive and can have quadratic cost if it's being constantly filled. It's a risky place to do actual "unlimited", and pretend "unlimited" is scummy.
My question was rhetorical. The problem is that their advertising is false - it is not unlimited when they put all kinds of restrictions on it. When their restrictions are unspecified it just makes matters worse, because it means I as a user has no recourse if they decide to shut down my account.
Can anyone explain the logic behind Google Drive's pricing?
Google Drive with 30 TB storage is priced at $300 per month. But then you have Google Drive for Work with unlimited storage and is priced at $10 per user per month. Meaning that you can get 30 users with unlimited storage for the same price. Why in hell would anyone pay that?
It's $0.01/GB, the same price as their nearline cloud storage option. On the work side, they are pooling the capacity at the business level.
In an enterprise environment that I'm familiar with that has 100k users on a shared file store solution... Something like 10% of users use less that 1GB, the 99th percentile user uses 1TB, the 90th percentile users is something like 30GB.
Agreed, but the point still stands. 'Unlimited' does not change definition based on price point. Especially if competitors offer paid-for limits above your 'unlimited', wouldn't that literally be false advertising? (Note: I'm not saying Amazon is, just addressing the above interpretation of 'Power user'
I think it's a reasonable thing to say on their part, it allows them to deal with weird cases, or errors that upload thousands of copies of the same file or something. It's just coverall-contracting.
I think the best practice is to use the following backup scheme:
- 1st line: your computer's HD.
- 2nd line: your SOHO NAS (very cheap these days, I have a 2 + 2 (mirror) TB NAS)
- 3rd line: remote backup
The sensitive info should be encrypted at your computer, possibly with an encryption software that is easy to use everywhere (e.g. GPG).
I can't think of any real-life scenario where these 3 copies get destroyed simultaneously.
Now the real problem here is upstream. In 3rd world countries like mine (Greece), we have an avg upstream of less than 100 kb/s. So if my pictures/video/pc/whatever backup is > 50 GB, uploading it anywhere is a pain.
Anything that supports RAID1 would do for me. I had a ReadyNAS in the past but now I have a cheap 2-bay D-Link[1] with 2 + 2 TB of Western Digital HDs installed. The important thing is the PSU which should support both power supply AND ethernet[2]. This setup is for just family pictures, documents and some family video that is all backed up via TimeMachine. My code is on bitbucket/github. Some work documents are on Google drive too.
ReadyNAS are way better especially the ones with INTEL cpus, since they can transcode video on the fly for some media players that require such a thing (e.g. you could stream video to your iPhone/iPad). But these are expensive and I don't need this kind of functionality.
If I had more than 5-10 TB of data to backup then I'd for a custom tower, 8 GB of memory, Gbit Ethernet of course and + FreeNAS (ZFS + FreeBSD network stack).
All the major cloud providers include clauses like this. Service is at their discretion. There is no uptime agreement. No guarantee your files will be there an hour from now.
NEVER keep important things only on a cloud service with no backups and no guarantee of service.
I don't think they're going to enforce a "you went way over the storage other people tend to use" cap, the way ISPs tend to. S3 stores petabytes of stuff; they can eat your 50GB-per-day wastefulness without breaking a sweat.
I think it's more to cover the case where you figure out a way to build a business that stores data in this, instead of in S3. Especially the case where that business is, itself, a primarily data storage or backup business, so you're directly living off the margin between "capital-cost storage for you" and "linear-revenue storage sold to customers." Amazon does not want to kill S3's business model, just yet.
Do you seriously expect a company to commit to not only guarantee that their service will be supported forever but on top of that, that they guarantee they won't shut you down regardless of what you store on their servers?
The chances of one of the hip companies going out of business is much, much higher for the average user than the chances of Amazon terminating their service.
Amazon is not Google; I wouldn't put anything on Drive, given their history of product cancellations.
Given that Amazon managed to "disappear" Orwell e-books that people bought from Amazon, before backpedaling, in the face of outrage and the overwhelming irony, I'm not certain I'd view them as an exemplary actor. Regardless, bunches of people offering free storage allows for a pleasing redundancy.
I'm not sure it's quite that simple. A smaller company doing this may go out of business, but Amazon may decide to stop for any number of simpler reasons, including but not limited to:
- Deciding that this isn't a lucrative service
- Deciding that it's had the desired effect on competition and served it's purpose
- Releasing another service that they decide competes with this but is better
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...